Amen

I don't count on it much, but if the afterlife really existed, between heaven and hell I would choose the latter.
It must be a place full of souls that have fun, chat, yell, drink, smoke, get high, fuck, dance, sing, read irreverent literature, listen to tempting music, think, doubt, cry tears of emotion, laugh with delight.
Fire does not scare me, it's just a symbol: it represents warmth, joy, dance, love.
How about heaven instead? What a drag that must be. Those ashen faces, the haughty smiles, the straw-white skirts. The sad, political victim like look of the doorman, good old Peter, would be enough to sink me into the most oppressing form of depression.
Honestly, I prefer the carnival style, the cheekiness and the mocking grin of Satan.
P.S. I almost forgot: Amen!

Borrowing from abstract art

These are two very famous abstract art paintings.
I'm not an art expert and I'm not gonna talk about art here. Yet I find art an extremely good tool to visually convey counter intuitive ideas, even those that have nothing to do with the artworks themselves.
I will use Kandinsky's "Composition VII" (the first one) to represent reality. Rothko's "No. 4, two dominants" (the second one) on the other hand can be thought to represent a polarized simplification of that same reality.
Now imagine trying to understand the complexity inherent in the first representation by using the second one as a model. Ridiculous, right?
Worse still, consider how stupid it would be to operate on the complex reality by using the polarized model.
Well, as absurd as it may seem, that is what many of us do every day, when it comes to pretty much everything we can think of.
In my opinion this is one of the main tragedies of our times.